Adrian,
I hope I’m not bearing bad news, but Photoshop Elements is not an image organizer. It is an image editor.
With regard to your questions about EXIF data… I am unaware of how to add EXIF data during a batch rename. Nor do I know how to edit the EXIF data using Elements.
Sorry, but I thought you should know.
Byron
After playing around with the program for a while, it seems like I’m not going to be able to do what I need. I specifically called Adobe customer support and asked them if I could perform these functions before I bought the product, so I guess I’m either missing something in the software or I got duped by a sales rep. =-/
There doesn’t seem to be any convenient way to download photos from my camera, either. I suppose it’s not a complete bust, though, since I can batch prepare my files for the web (although I probably could have solved that problem a little cheaper).
Are there any third-party scripts that might be able to add some more EXIF functionality to Elements? I’m familiar with writing AppleScript code for other Mac OS X applications. Thanks.
Adrian_Down wrote:
Are there any third-party scripts that might be able to add some more EXIF functionality to Elements? I’m familiar with writing AppleScript code for other Mac OS X applications. Thanks.
On a PC you would look for Exifer. There is an equivalent on Mac, and someone will come along with an answer. You could search google groups archive of this group, and use exif, exifer or similar as a keyword.
—
Ed Wurster
http://www.ewurster.com/blog/
Adrian,
Glad you found a solution.
FYI to others — it’s Mac-only.
Byron
Reference downloading pics from your camera, this is how to do it for Windows – Mac should be similar – assuming the camera has a USB connector. Then it should have come with a special USB lead to connect the camera to the PC.
1. Plug the lead into a USB port on the PC
2. Plug the other end into the camera. Make the connections in this order because the camera USB socket will probably be a miniature version and more susceptible to damage than the PC end.
3. Select the camera setting to play back the images throught its own display.
4. Turn on the camera.
The PC may seem to freeze for a short time – up to 20 secs. A small icon then appears in the Quick Launch bar (near the clock).
5. Open My computer and you should see a ‘Removable Drive’ – this is your camera.
6. Double click the Removable Drive and you will be able to find your pictures in the memory card whose contents ae shown as normal Windows folders. The camera instructios should tell you the name of the folder containing the pictures. Otherwise open the folders one by one until you see a list of JPG files.
7. Now you can drag and drop these picture files to a folder on you PC like any other files.
8. When you are done, first close all the camera folders and My Computer. Then click the icon in the Quick Lauch area and then click on Disconnect Removable Drive (words may be different). A message will say it is now safe to remove the drive.
9. Now turn off the camera and remove the lead from it. You can leave the lead plugged into the PC if you like.
Although the DateTree program works very well for organizing with EXIF data, I can’t seem to find anything to edit the actual EXIF data itself. Does anyone know of any Mac programs with this capability? I’d only need to make limited use of it to change the dates on some of my older scanned photos, so freeware or something with a free trial period would be ideal. Sorry to be such a cheapskate, but I’m a college student, and rent’s expensive =)
Adrian,
What was your problem with iPhoto? …
Wendy
I was hoping that Graphic Converter would do this; while it seems to edit the IPTC data it doesn’t seem to edit the EXIF date itself – but I don’t have the latest version, so it might be worth a look (shareware with functional demo).
This:
<
http://www.picturefinder.com/software/iit/welcome.hmtl> is both Mac and Windows, but may work ( not free but has a demo – I haven’t tried it) There are any number of Windows EXIF editors but I can’t find much for Macs. (Edit to add – Photoshop CS seems to be able to do this but isn’t a cheap solution!!)
I think I had iPhoto v. 2.0. I don’t know if any of the following problems have been addressed in subsequent releases. Some of the problems I had with iPhoto:
Levels of organization were very limited. Albums were basically the only sorting mechanism. I would really have liked to have been able to make hierarchies, with a few "sub-albums" within any given album. I find hierarchical structures to be an effective organization technique, especially when dealing with large sets of files.
No batch renaming or info editing abilities. This was especially bad since I had a large number of files and many of them were older scanned images with incorrect dates.
Name and date changes in iPhoto were not reflected in the original image file. Files were still named "Pic 0010234.jpg" in finder after being renamed in iPhoto.
Captive file folder structure with lots of artifacts like document files and thumbnail images. It was very hard for me to locate specific images outside of iPhoto to open in any other application, such as email or another image editor. The email option included in iPhoto itself was also quite limited, since it retained the original file names, such as "Pic 0010234.jpg" instead of indicating the name associated with the image in iPhoto. I also had problems if I tried to send these email messages after quitting iPhoto.
The speed of iPhoto goes down considerably as image libraries get larger. To keep the speed reasonable, I had to get a companion program (iPhoto Buddy) that allowed me to run multiple libraries. Hardly an elegant solution, especially if you’re often going back and forth between libraries.
These are some of my personal experiences with iPhoto. I wanted two things in an image program: organiztional capacity and functionality. iPhoto offered very little in the way of either of these. It does have some other functions, like creating slide shows and ordering prints, that I never made use of. iPhoto might be much better suited to a more casual user who took advantage of these more "cosmetic" capabilities.
One question: I put lots of carriage returns in when writing my message board posts, but when they show up, they’re just humongeous blocks of text (not very pleasing to look at, I know). According to the info above the message box, "a blank line starts a new paragraph," but I don’t see it. Do I need to use some HTML tag?
Ah…silly me…never mind. The carriage returns show up only after the message is posted. =-X
Adrian,
iPhoto 4 is way better but some of the problems still exist. Even though you can now have many more photographs in iPhoto without it slowing down at all I still use iPhoto Buddy. My organisation tends to emulate how you would file images in paper Albums … so I have separate libraries for them and then they are split into albums within the library.
Example: Library is Holidays 2004 then each 2004 holiday has its own Album.
Wendy
